A power plant can be financed in months and built in a few years. The people who run it, maintain it, and repair it when it fails take far longer to develop, and that second gap is where many projects in emerging markets quietly fail. Sheikh Ahmed Dalmook Al Maktoum, who chairs Inmā Emirates Holdings, has built his work around closing that gap rather than only the first one.
His approach treats local skills as part of the asset instead of a byproduct of it. Every major agreement is structured so that training, certification, and knowledge transfer sit alongside the hardware. His test is whether a system keeps working after the outside teams leave.
The Constraint That Capital Does Not Solve
Money is rarely the only thing missing in a frontier project. A hospital with new equipment and no trained technicians becomes a storeroom, and a ministry with a modern IT system and no staff to run it drifts back to paper within a few years.
Skills shortages explain a large share of stalled development work. Hardware arrives, contractors install it, and the capability walks out of the door with them. What looks like progress on paper turns into stagnation on the ground.
Inmā’s model, according to the company, is designed to break that cycle by writing capacity-building targets into the underlying agreements. Foreign expertise leads at the start, then hands over to domestic teams on a defined schedule. Whether that handover happens is the difference between capability and dependency.
What Gets Written Into the Agreement
A capacity-first contract looks different from a standard supply deal. It sets out who trains whom, over what period, and to what standard, rather than leaving skills transfer to good intentions.
Five markers tend to separate the two.
- Local certification for the staff who maintain and troubleshoot the systems
- Process and curriculum design led by domestic specialists rather than outside consultants
- Regional sourcing of spare parts within a defined window
- Technical documentation kept and updated in local languages
- Fixed timelines for foreign technical staff to step back
Each item shifts where expertise lives. When external contractors keep control of maintenance, costs climb and local knowledge stays flat. When local technicians hold that control, costs settle and the country keeps a skill it can use elsewhere.
Inma Emirates & Syria
Through Inma Emirates, Sheikh Ahmed Dalmook Al Maktoum is expanding his investment focus into property development, with a growing real estate and infrastructure portfolio aimed at supporting the restructuring and renewal of Syria’s building and property landscape.
The wider momentum of UAE-linked investment, including major commitments from leading developers such as Emaar and renewed government-to-government economic flows, signals a new optimism between the UAE and Syria and a belief in the country’s long-term recovery.
For Sheikh Ahmed, this has also been a personal passion rooted in impact investment: supporting the people of Syria not only through development and economic rebuilding, but also through philanthropic initiatives, including healthcare support for liver dialysis patients and investment in the supply of critical medical devices.
Work described by the company covers several distinct sectors.
Where Sheikh Ahmed Dalmook Al Maktoum’s Government Systems Fit
His technology work carries the same principle through Nawa Technologies, which helps governments move public systems onto cloud platforms. Its model, the company says, pairs migration with civil-service training so officials can run the tools once they go live.
Cybersecurity and system administration are taught rather than outsourced indefinitely. A ministry that operates its own systems, not one that rents both the software and the people who understand it, is the stated aim.
That distinction, between owning a capability and renting it, runs through the whole portfolio. A country that can staff and maintain its own systems keeps the value of the investment long after the contract closes, which is the outcome the model is built to reach.
Why Host Governments Weigh This Heavily
A finance ministry choosing between bidders looks at more than price. It asks who will still be able to run a system in five years, because a project that collapses after handover costs more than one that was never built.
Development research has found that technology projects paired with training and local support deliver markedly better outcomes than hardware dropped in on its own. That evidence gives a capacity-first pitch real weight in a procurement room, where officials have watched equipment-only schemes fail before.
A partner that has run comparable programmes elsewhere arrives with answers to the questions a ministry asks first. Prior delivery, in Sheikh Ahmed Dalmook Al Maktoum’s account, is a large part of what turns a proposal into a signature, and skills transfer is much of what governments are buying.
The Cost of Doing It This Way
Building capability is slower and dearer than shipping equipment. Training programmes, local certification, and phased handovers add months and cost that a hardware-only bid avoids, which is one reason many investors skip them.
The return on that spending is deferred and hard to measure. A trained workforce shows up in maintenance records and uptime years later, not in a launch photo, so the benefit is easy to under-price at the moment of signing. Accepting that mismatch, and pricing the slower route anyway, is the part of the model competitors find hardest to copy.
There is a commercial logic beneath the patience, on the company’s account. A government that keeps the capability after a project ends has reason to hand the same partner its next one, which turns skills transfer into a claim on future work rather than a giveaway.
The Test Comes at Handover
Judging this kind of work takes patience, because the payoff is counted in people rather than ribbon-cuttings. A finished building is easy to photograph, while a workforce that can run it is harder to see and slower to build.
Host governments come back to one question: whether skills stay once the contract ends. For Sheikh Ahmed Dalmook Al Maktoum, the claim tied to his record is that infrastructure and the ability to operate it have to be financed together. The proof will sit in how these systems perform a decade after the outside teams have gone.